A group of KDE hackers went to the FOSDEM event to represent KDE. FOSDEM is a two-day summit were leading developers in the Free Software community come together. It is an event held by developers, for developers where you can attend many interesting presentations, mingle and hold discussions with other projects.

Some (KDE) people already arrived on Friday night and got together
in downtown Brussels. We had a nice time drinking beers like Maredsous and Duvel
in a pub called Manneken Pis, close to Grand Place and across from thefamous statue.

Saturday 10:30, FOSDEM 2004 kicked of with a talk from Tim O'Reilly. Not completely back in the land of the living you can
find those KDE hackers
(left to right: Cies Breijs, Simon Edwards, Adriaan de Groot, Otto Brugman) attending that talk. After the O'Reilly talk,
Richard Stallman held a talk about the Free Software Foundation.

Every year the event follows some kind of theme and this year it is accessibility which been chosen as a main
theme and so some of the tracks were dedicated to accessibility software. FOSDEM 2004 had a friendly and inspiring atmosphere,
where hackers moved from one room to another to attend the talks.
You could find all kind of developers staffing their booth and telling you about their project.

Comments

Scince I am not a native english speking person I dinden't understand this sentence "while Keith Packard's "XFree86" talk was standing room only!".
Does it man there was no one else in the Romm listening or The whole Place was crowded so you only could stand around to listen?
thanks,
Karl

Well, the freedesktop.org version is a regular X server. Qt/KDE already works just fine on the fd.o server. Now to take full advantage of the new server, they'd need a new Qt painter that could do anti-aliased drawing via Cairo.

Xserver is based on Kdrive, but it improves and builds upon it. It's not related to Xfree (apart from that they are both X-servers). While Keiths Xserver is not a drop-in replacement for Xfree yet (it's still relatively young), it is improving and there are people using it instead of Xfree RIGHT NOW. There will be an official release of Xserver sometime in the future.

I'm not that interested in Xfree, Xserver seems to be where the action is. And since Keith Packard is it's lead architecht, I would have guessed that he would talk about it instead of Xfree.

Windows is more established and it has more hardware-drivers, maybe we should all concentrate on improving Windows instead of concentrating on Linux?

Just because something is "established" is not a good enough reason to think about replacement. Xfree may be "established", and it shows! it's developement is stagnating. Without any competition, they have no reason to really improve.